Moon
by idioticonion
Summary: Barney gets mugged in Central Park. Spoilers - s5 hiatus ep5-6. Mild horror and sexual situations - it's a halloween fic!
1. Chapter 1

Moon

The big, fat, ol' moon shone down on Manhattan indiscriminately that night. It shone on drugstores and pizza joints and coffee bars. It blazed over St Antony's hospital and was clearly visible through the large bay windows of the ER, incongruously cheery.

It emphasised the shadows.

To Ted, everything seemed too bright, too colourful, like a series of over-exposed photographs rather than real life. Individual images made sense, burned on his retinas, imprinted on the hard-drive of his brain.

Barney, pale-faced with pain, hunched over the cheap, plastic seat, the material of his Armani sweat pats wrinkled around the bottom of his sneakers.

The blood-drops scattered over the floor at Barney's feet.

Robin, her face as ghost-white as Barney's was, soft and earnest, frozen mid-sentence while she tried to keep on talking to him, reassuring him. It felt like hours that they were left there, although it was probably minutes.

Lily and Marshall, hands outstretched as they burst through the swing doors into the waiting room, Lily's face etched with horror, Marshall's almost green with nausea when they saw what had happened to their friend.

"Wow," Lily said with a half-laugh. "When Robin called me to say you'd been mugged, I was ready to rip you a new one, the number of times I'd told you to stick to the main pathways when you take a run around the park. But now I can see that someone beat me to it."

"Lily!" Ted found himself saying, horrified, as sound and moving pictures crashed in on him once again.

Barney's phone call had been weird, almost surreal. Even now, Ted wondered why they hadn't just called an ambulance.

"I'm hurt," Barney's voice, strained, staccato and strangely quiet. "Cuts and bruises. Need to get to a hospital. Can you pick me up?"

Cuts and bruises they'd expected, when Robin bundled into the back seat of the cab after him. But Ted was totally unprepared for what he saw, once his brain had processed the pictures, once he realised that the dark stain across Barney's chest and shoulder was blood, not water. The treacherous moon had made it look black. Even now, in the unforgiving strip-lighting of the hospital, it didn't look real. So close to Halloween, Ted half believed that Barney would turn around any second and tell everyone what a legendary prank he'd just pulled on them. But when a doctor finally (finally!) managed to see him, Ted was disabused of this notion.

The Doc pulled gently at the shredded material of Barney's zippered track top and fresh blood welled up from the deep slashes in his chest. Marshall's hand smacked over his mouth. Lily looked as though she was going to faint.

"These are some wounds, son," The doctor said, working quickly to stem the blood flow, giving Barney a shot of something. "The cops'll want to know, what kind of knife-?"

"Wasn't a knife-" Barney said, through clenched teeth. "Was a claw-" Mercifully Barney's eyes fluttered shut and he passed out.

"Did he say 'claw'?" Marshall asked later, wonderingly.

"Sure sounded like it," Ted said.

And because it was Halloween and after two a.m., and the full moon made every tree into a monster, they all shivered.

Only Robin believed it was due to the cold.

*--*--*

The attack on Barney was only the first of a series of violent attacks in Central Park that month. Over the next few days, the cops called on GNB a dozen times, trying to eek out the details of Barney's statement. But as far as Marshall could see, they got nothing new. Barney had been out running, had strayed off the path. Someone (or something) had jumped him in the dark and he'd managed to roll away from them when he fell. Barney claimed that he hadn't felt the knife and he was fit enough and quick-witted enough to get back on his feet and run as fast as he could.

But he remembered the claw, coming at him, a flash of cold silver lit by moonlight. The detective who interviewed him put it down to a trick of the light, a memory defect caused by fear and adrenalin, but Barney insisted he'd seen a claw.

Marshall was the first person to say it the word, although admittedly he said it when he was sure Barney wasn't within earshot.

Robin scoffed. "Marshall, there's no such thing as a were-"

"Robin!" Marshall shushed her, miming zipping his lips shut. "He's only over at the bar!"

Robin laughed and shook her head while Ted shrugged indulgently. "We don't say the wmmr-wmmf word." He grinned. "Apparently."

Marshall snorted. "Yeah. Yeah. Because _you_… you guys… you won't be laughing during the next full moon." His voice took on a ghoulish quality. "He who survives an attack by a werewolf is himself cursed."

"Someone's been watching American Werewolf In London," Ted said, grinning.

"How awesome is that film?" Marshall grinned.

"Totally." Ted fist-bumped him.

"Guys, Barney is not a werewolf," Robin said. "Don't you think I would know?"

"The knife wounds are healing real quickly," Ted conceded.

"And he keeps sniffing me!" Lily complained.

"What-?" Marshall asked, worried.

Lily nodded. "You know that werewolves have a heightened sense of smell."

"If he grows fangs and starts howling at the moon, you guys will be the first to know, okay?" Robin said, laughing, just as Barney came back to their table with a round of drinks.

"What'ya talking about?" He asked, sitting next to Robin.

"Top Ten Halloween films," Ted improvised. "We were debating if any of the Saw films qualify…"

But Barney wasn't listening. He'd leaned into Robin, pressing his face into her hair and breathing in. "Mmmm, you smell great today…" He murmured.

Robin tried to ignore the look Lily shot her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Part 2**

It was Friday night, going on Saturday morning, exactly 27 days and four hours since Barney was mugged in central park. Robin awoke to find the bed cold beside her. As her hand groped across the mattress, she wondered if Barney was sleep-climbing out of her window again. She half-sat up, in the darkness. Her body clock was still set on COGUNY time and she often found it impossible to sleep through the night at the weekend, even when she had that luxury.

"Barney?" She called out, irritably. Her memory was sleep-fogged. Had he even stayed over? She rubbed her eyes and considered what she should do. It was freezing cold outside the covers - November had turned bitter almost overnight - but it was toasty-warm here in bed. Still, it would be even warmer with him in it.

Robin grumbled and pulled her robe tightly around her body as she got up and padded barefoot out of her room. It wasn't as if Ted's apartment was large, but there suddenly seemed to be a cavernous void where the living room used to be, full of hulking, shadowy shapes, ready to trip her up in the dark. Slowly, as her eyes became accustom to the gloom, Robin realised that it wasn't exactly pitch-dark. The street lights outside send a faint glow, picking out corners and obstacles.

She could see the full moon, round and plump, through a crack in the curtains. This whole situation was eerie, not in the least due to Barney's increasingly odd behaviour. If Robin thought he was being weird over the summer, then lately he had gotten way worse. He was… okay, he was really tactile, sexually insatiable, none of that was particularly strange. But it was the _way_ he touched her - a little more roughly, more possessively than usual. It wasn't even easy to describe. And there was no way she could talk to Lily or Marshall who were still fixated on their werewolf theory.

Robin picked her way across the living room in the direction of the kitchen. In the darkness, there was suddenly a clinking sound. She jumped.

A clink, a tiny glass chime, should not be as scary as this; it shouldn't send her almost out of her skin with fright. A clink was an innocent sound.

The low growl that followed it a few seconds later, however, was bowl-clenching terrifying.

Robin backed away from the kitchen towards her bedroom, stumbling through the door and closing it tight-shut, as quietly as she could. She told herself she was being stupid. She told herself that her mind was playing tricks on her. She told herself that she, Robin Scherbatsky, was now a half-American. She had no business being afraid of the dark.

She slowly turned around, her heart racing.

Only to find there, in the middle of her bedroom, a dark shadow of a naked man, standing perfectly still, facing her.

She screamed blue-bloody murder and fumbled with the light switch until the room was illuminated by sudden brightness.

Barney began to laugh, and didn't stop laughing until she threatened to kick him in the balls.

*--*--*

"You _shit_!" Robin said, half with tearful relief, half seeing the funny side. She hugged him tight. His bare skin was clammy and tasted like cold roast beef and smoky-air. "You're freezing. What the hell were you doing?"

Barney chuckled in her ear as she bundled him into bed and wrapped them both tight in her comforter. "Couldn't sleep," he mumbled, by way of explanation, snuggling closer to her. "Went out onto the fire escape for a smoke."

"Naked?" She laughed. "You idiot." She felt his lips curve into a grin. "No, I really _mean_ you're an idiot. You almost gave me a heart attack!"

"Happy Halloween," Barney chuckled, grinning, his cool tongue darting out to lick a swathe over her breast.

"That was last month, idiot," she said crossly, while he continued to lick her like an over-enthusiastic puppy. Then, when he gently worried her nipple with his teeth, she forgot that she was still angry with him. When his tongue travelled south, she forgot how to think at all.

And afterwards, she didn't even wonder why, as she lay in a sated haze, at four a.m. in the morning, he insisted on taking a shower and heading back home.

*--*--*

And that's where the story would have ended, but for the fact that twenty-eight days after Barney was mugged, the attacks in the park started up again. There were three, that first night, And this time, the victims were all young women. One of them even died.

Things that would have seemed quite normal a few weeks ago - Barney talking to a girl at the bar, Barney working late at the office, Barney pawing Robin at the booth, all these were open to intense scrutiny from his friends, who seemed determined to slot all his behaviours into their werewolf-theory. Lily and Marshall only seemed to be half-kidding.

"I asked him to help me chop some tomatoes yesterday," Lily said. "And he just stood there, staring at the knife until I took it away from him. That's creepy!"

Robin laughed derisively. "That's just what he does! When you ask him to do anything, he does it so badly that you give up!"

Ted nodded. "He totally does that."

"But then I caught him eating from the fresh mince steak I'd bought to make the Bolognese sauce!" Lily continued. "It was raw guys! That's gross!"

"Where was he last night?" Marshall asked. "When those girls were attacked by the werewolf-"

Robin shook her head in despair. Ted covered his grin with his hand.

"Yes, werewolf!" Marshall said stridently. "In order to save Barney, we'd need to find the master werewolf, the one who made him, and kill it!"

Ted chimed in. "That might not be possible. What if the master werewolf has left New York by now? I mean, he might not even know he's a werewolf. According to the ancient lore, then often don't."

Robin sighed. She obviously had to be the voice of reason. "Listen to yourselves! You're acting like children. Barney is not a werewolf!"

"Then where was he last night?" Marshall repeated, a little stridently.

"With me, all night!" Robin lied. "Having sex!" Her tell-tale giggle gave her away.

"Hah!" Marshall crowed, triumphantly.

And somehow, after another half hour of heated debate, they decided to hold an intervention.

*--*--*

Robin could not have been more embarrassed. The new banner had been made by daubing the word "Intervention" in red paint and letting it drip to look like blood.

She covered her face with her hands.

Barney laughed at first, sure it was a prank. But when Lily and Marshall told him, very earnestly, that if he didn't stop being a werewolf they were going to buy some silver bullets for Robin's guns, he just stared at them.

"Werewolf? Really?" Barney pretended to look thoughtful. "I mean, I guess it could be an interesting play for the ladies?" He laughed. "But come on, I'm done with all that. Besides, Canada here is afraid of the regular dark, can you imagine how she'd feel about a darkness invested by lycanthropes?"

"Lycanthrope?" Robin asked.

"A mythological or folkloric human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf," Barney rattled out. "But that's not important. Come on guys, I'm not a werewolf!"

"Prove it!" Lily demanded. "Prove you didn't attack those beautiful, helpless, nubile women in order to slake your bestial and bloodthirsty carnal desires!"

Marshall gave her a look. "Baby?"

Lily coughed, a little flushed.

"Lemme get this straight," Barney snapped. "_You_… want _me_… to prove… that I'm _not_ a werewolf?"

They all nodded, except Robin. Barney shook his head and flipped them off.

"Nice, buddy," Marshall said, angrily. "Real nice."

Barney rolled his eyes. "You guys really are totally lame sometimes, you know?" He switch on the TV, changing channels to the news. The sound came on way too loud, startling them all.

"-arrest was made this morning. William Randal of Columbus, Ohio-"

"Go Buckeyes!" Ted piped up with a grin. Lily shushed him.

"-has been charged with the spate of knife attacks in Central Park recently. Police-sources have told us that he was caught in possession of a claw-like weapon, actually the head of a garden rake, that had been sharpened into points, and this macabre-"

Barney flipped the television on to mute and turned to the gang with a raised eyebrow. Marshall and Lily had the good sense to look abashed. Ted had sat back down on the couch and was watching the screen intently.

Robin slid her arms around Barney's waist. "So you're not a werewolf?" She asked him. He nuzzled her neck and smiled. "Damn," she said under her breath. "I think werewolves are hot."

"I can howl!" Barney replied with a low chuckle.

"Nah," Robin laughed and pulled away from him. "Ted complains about the noise enough as it is-"

He silenced her with a kiss.

Lily smiled. "Well, no. This is good. Barney's not a werewolf. Our streets are safe again, Ted's being a nerd, Barney and Robin are making out like horny teenagers and alls right with the world."

Robin threw a cushion at her. "Yeah it is!" She grinned. And it was.


End file.
